He gambles, smokes cigars, consorts with hookerbots, had, at one point 50 terabytes of porn on his hard drive, and is constantly trying to gain attention to boost his already over-inflated ego. He is equipped with a gaydar, though it ultimately claims everyone is gay. He currently lives with Fry in his closet-sized apartment, fully equipped with an apartment-sized closet. He hates his self-destruct sequence. He has an affinity for turtles, penguins, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Bender was made Pharaoh on the planet Osiris 4, but his servants fed up with inhumane treatment sent him to his grave.

Bender also is fascinated with cooking, though he is shown to have little sense of actual human taste, often creating dishes that can kill plant life. He also thinks that humans eat rocks. His strangest trait is that magnets, when attached to his head, mess up his inner inhibition unit, causing him to act like a folk singer.

Bender often exhibits sociopathic behavior, is a pathological liar and rarely shows any empathy. He has a mostly voluntary morality and constantly steals, ranging from the petty theft of wallets to crimes such as kidnapping Jay Leno’s head and stealing Fry’s blood. He also once stole Amy’s earrings while giving her a hug. It was shown in “Roswell That Ends Well” that even in a disassembled state, his individual limbs carry on attempting to steal anything in proximity; the hand on his dismembered arm steals a wallet out of a scientist’s pocket before becoming inactive again.

He is shown throughout the series as having a secret desire to be a folk musician that only manifests itself when a magnet is placed on or near his head. This desire is finally fulfilled in the episode “Bendin’ in the Wind”: an accident involving a giant can opener leaves him with a mutilated chest and paralyzed from the neck down. An encounter with Beck during his hospitalization leads to his becoming lead washboard player and the two teaming up for a musical tour that turns Bender into a folk hero for other broken robots, only for his career to end when he finally recovers.

He is also fascinated with cooking, being the Planet Express ship’s chef, though he is shown to have no sense of actual human taste, in fact, his early dinners were so horrible that even the literally omnivorous Zoidberg could not eat it. In his first attempt, he creates a dinner for the crew that is so over-salted they all gag which is aggravated further when their drinks turn out to be salt water; he then remarks that the food was fine since the salt content was 10% below a lethal dose. In “The Problem with Popplers”, he creates dinner consisting of nothing but capers and baking soda and mistakenly expresses the belief that humans eat rocks. He seems to improve his cooking skills over the series, cooking a lavish cake for Nibbler’s birthday party and beating Elzar for the title of Iron Cook. In Into the Wild Green Yonder, he mistakenly bakes prison guards a cake with nutmeg thinking it was a natural human sleep drug, before being corrected by Amy that nutmeg is in fact a baking ingredient.

He also states, “I’ve always wanted to break into gooning.” in the episode “Bender Gets Made.”

As a robot, he possesses an incredible amount of patience. In Futurama, he is shown to wait over a thousand years in sand after his head is lost during a trip back in time to 1947, as well as many thousands of years in subterranean caverns under New New York City. Despite the long wait, it is implied that Bender does not power down, apparently enjoying his own company so much that he does not consider it necessary. However, in one episode, he shows next to no patience as a one-time joke.

Although the consumption of alcohol is necessitated by Bender’s design and should not be generally viewed as a vice for alcohol-fueled robots, he apparently drinks far more than he needs for energy. His excessive drinking contributes to his characterization as an alcoholic. If he is deprived of alcohol, for instance during periods of depression, he ceases to function properly and shows signs similar to human drunkenness, including developing a rusty 5 o’clock shadow. As noted above, his disembodied head has survived for millennia with, presumably, no source of alcohol, so it may be that, when a mere head, Bender neither requires alcohol nor suffers from its absence.

When he is sufficiently frightened or sickened, bricks fall from his backside. When sufficiently fascinated by something, he may pull out a camera and snap a picture, adding the catchphrase “Neat!”. In addition to drinking, he also has an affinity for cigars, which he ignites with a lighter built into his finger, although in “Decision 3012″ he uses a Zippo. Unlike drinking alcohol for fuel, Bender tells Fry that he smokes cigars simply because they “make look cool.”

Despite being a robot, he has been seen to show emotion on many occasions, going so far as to shed a tear in “Crimes of the Hot”, to Fry’s astonishment. One of the series’ running jokes revolves around Bender having emotions, when technically he should be an unfeeling machine. Bender is seemingly unaware of his emotions, stating in the episode “Anthology of Interest II” “I mean, being a robot’s great but we don’t have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad”. In his very first appearance, he tries to commit suicide via a suicide booth out of guilt for having unknowingly contributed to their creation. He has also been known to be nonchalant to the point of appearing both uncaring and incredibly brave, even in life-threatening situations.

Bender is a classic narcissist. He considers himself flawless, a “towering inferno of physical perfection”, and refers to himself in both the first and third person. In “The Farnsworth Parabox” Bender seemingly falls in love with an alternate gold-plated version of himself, stating that he has finally found someone “as great as me”.

Despite these human characteristics, he has no verifiable soul, as seen in “Obsoletely Fabulous” when he passes through a “soul detector” without setting off the alarm. However, in “Ghost in the Machines”, Bender becomes a ghost who can’t interact with people directly but can possess machinery: he uses this ability to “scare Fry to death”. He eventually makes a deal with the Robot Devil to get a new body.

His relationships with the rest of the crew of Planet Express vary over time, although he treats nearly all biological organisms with disdain. The only one of his friends who he has openly shown affection for is Fry, his best friend and roommate. “Of all the friends I’ve had, [he is] the first.” Although he is verbally and physically abusive towards Fry and considers him to be vastly inferior to him, he has been shown to care for him a great deal. In “Jurassic Bark” he states that he loves Fry “the way a human loves a dog” and in “I Second That Emotion” when Bender gets jealous of Nibbler and flushes him down the toilet, a distraught Leela asks how he would feel if she did the same to Fry, describing Fry as Bender’s pet. He routinely takes advantage of his friends: framing them for crimes, robbing them, stealing Fry’s blood on more than one occasion, stealing Fry’s power of attorney, using Fry’s body to smash open a window, stealing jewelry from Amy, as well as using Zoidberg in various get-rich-quick schemes, although it is probable he does not consider Dr. Zoidberg a friend since in “Obsoletely Fabulous” Bender begged the 1X Robot to “save friends and Zoidberg”. He even betrays Leela to Zapp when she becomes a wanted criminal, out of jealousy of her steadily growing rap sheet, in Into the Wild Green Yonder, only to break her out of prison again to ensure his own sheet remains lengthier. Although he regularly frustrates the crew, they have demonstrated a certain affection for him in return. During “How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back” the entire crew traveled to the Central Bureaucracy to recover his brain after Morgan Proctor burned it onto an optical disc and sent it away, when Hermes Conrad subsequently risks his bureaucratic license to locate the disc with Bender’s brain on it by sorting the entire pile in just under four minutes. In the same episode, when Amy asked why they had to fix him, after being met with a brief period of uncertain silence, Leela responded with “Those arguments aside, we’re still going.” Amy and Bender date for a time in “Proposition Infinity”; the relationship becomes so serious that Bender proposes to Amy and participates in a campaign to legalize human/robot marriage, although the relationship ends after he realizes that such marriage rights would necessitate monogamy.

Despite his often immoral attitude, he does not lack a soft side; he can feel guilt and remorse over his actions if he goes too far, indicating that he is not as selfish or unkind as he appears to be. In “Bendless Love”, Bender intends to murder Flexo in order to gain the love of fem-bot Angelyne, but when Flexo gets stuck under a gigantic steel girder, Angelyne shows sorrow for him. Bender decides that her happiness is more important than his own, and ends up saving Flexo. Also, in “Jurassic Bark”, when Bender becomes jealous of Fry’s petrified dog, Seymour, he decides to throw him in magma. But when he realizes how Fry becomes deeply hurt, Bender apologizes for his behavior and rescues the dog. In “Godfellas”, he becomes the god of a microscopic alien race known as the Shrimpkins and abuses this position by commanding them to produce beer for him. When this abuse causes the entire species’ demise, however, he cries in mourning and remorse.